Dr Noel McCarthy

speaker

129 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 7 Aug

Dr Noel McCarthy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Talking History with Patrick Geoghegan · Neolithic Tombs In Galway · 7 Aug 2026 podcast

And that's actually shown by the excavation we have currently, where bulldozers were used to clear the site for modern mechanized farming.

So we get to have a look at all the kind of stages of change in a controlled

um confined space because all the peninsula is quite large, it's not huge.

You know, it's a few square kilometers.

So it's enough of a microcosm that we could then expand that idea into coastal landscapes along the western coast, particularly um where you have this rugged and exposed terrain.

Well, you you never know what to expect is the the main thing.

Um we knew there was a court tomb here.

Um it was recorded uh sort of maybe 40 meters away from uh where it actually lies today.

So um we knew there was something in the field in this specific instance.

In general, across the whole Mari Peninsula, there's a strong uh distribution of monuments of all types.

Now prehistory is a little bit underrepresented, I think.

I think but that's because I think the farmland being so good has been farmed time over time.

So I think we've lost a lot of monuments on the visible surface, things like um Bronze Age or Iron Age barrows, which are earthen monuments, and very easily kind of ploughed away in good farmland.

Now hopefully we'll m manage to find some of them with various investigation techniques.

But in terms of the immediate site that we're looking at now.

We definitely knew the court tomb was here in some shape or fashion.

Um we didn't know that the portal tomb was here.

We knew there was a big capstone that was removed back in the nineteen sixties at the same time the court tomb was uh levelled effectively.

But we didn't know if that was one of the stones from the court tomb that had been moved, or was it maybe a totally different later monument, or was it just a random stone that happened to be in the field?

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